After more than a decade in the telecom industry, Rajesh Razdanrealised that despite India's glowing mobile growth story, there were still large gaps in the mobile value-added services space. "India is a complex country with different types of devices, multiple operators and different languages. Each telco used its own platform to deploy its VAS offerings so a developer would have to innovate for several platforms, which is time consuming," says Razdan, 37, who has previously worked in Ericsson, Nokia and Comviva.

He was joined by his former Comviva colleague Brij Mohan Mahendru, 43, and together they launched Noida-based mCarbon Tech Innovation in 2008. "We wanted to do a tech-led innovation for telcos to engage their customers and increase their revenues," says Razdan. The duo created Greenroom, a platform that would work for all operators, enabling them to quickly deploy multiple network-based products across voice, data, SMS and devices.

The platform also allows VAS developers to build products that can then be deployed for different operators. India is the second-largest mobile market in the world with 900 million telecom subscribers. The mobile VAS market that mCarbon is targeting is expected to reach Rs 33,280 crore in 2013, according to a study by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI)-IMRB. The company bagged its first client Bharti Airtel by mid-2008, within months of the venture's launch.

They rolled out Call Manager, which allows users to bar or filter calls at a certain time. By 2009, the company began working with all the top telecom operators in the country, including Idea, MTS, Tata Docomo and Uninor and Vodafone. Razdan took a conscious call to work with only the top operators and says this has stood them in good stead during the 2G scam when licences of some operators, who were not clients of the company, were cancelled.

While the company began rolling out numerous products, like call manager, caller ring back and other content-related services, it was in 2011—when the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) made the 'Do Not Disturb' registry mandatory—that the company saw wide acceptance of its platform. "It was a major milestone for us as we got about 70 per cent of the market," says Razdan.

The company began with a licence-fee revenue model, but has now shifted to an annuity model, where the company works as a partner of the telecom operator.

"Our partnership with mCarbon for the last five years has delivered innovative, unique and affordable services," says N Rajaram, chief marketing officer of Bharti Airtel. The young venture is now getting ready for the next phase of VAS growth in the country. "Now it is about customer retention and providing them more advanced services and we use the massive data we have to make services more relevant," says the entrepreneur, who did his engineering from University of Pune and MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur.

The company, with the help of its analytics, is working on a call completion solution, were calls that get disconnected in the middle of a conversation due to network issues can get reconnected when the network is back. Alok Mittal, managing director of Canaan Partners, which has invested $5 million (about Rs 27 crore) in mCarbon in two tranches, says that telecom operators cannot rely on just voice and SMS anymore to grow their revenues. "The old way of doing VAS, where telcos would push services, is also not working. Telcos need to create products that will match what the consumer is demanding and that is where mCarbon provides value."

The emerging company, which is targeting over $6 million (about Rs 32 crore) in revenue in fiscal 2013, is now looking beyond India to speed up growth. The venture has a presence in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Africa.

"We are planning to go to the Middle East and Asia-Pacific markets next. We are following our telecom clients—as they grow to new markets so do we," says Razdan.